Andean Pleiades-watching was genuine empirical climate prediction

Evidence

Read from Quechua/Andean astronomical and folktale sources. The Andean peoples were keen astronomers (as farming peoples must be), and the star-cluster we call the Pleiades — which they call Qollqa (‘the storehouse’) or the ‘little eyes’ — was of supreme importance: its appearance and brightness in the sky was watched closely each year to predict the coming rains and to time the planting of the crops (remarkably, modern science has confirmed that the apparent brightness of the Pleiades, affected by high-altitude cloud associated with El Niño, genuinely correlates with the coming rainfall — so the Andean farmers’ ancient star-watching was sound science!) — , A Year of World Stories, 10674

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my broader interests in whether ‘myth’ and ‘science’ were opposed for ancient peoples, and cross-cultural astronomy. — connects to: Temperature autocorrelation reveals weather’s daily and seasonal periodicities.
• SEED: Article angle: how indigenous star-lore that turns out to be empirically validated (Pleiades-rainfall via El Niño cloud) challenges the myth-vs-science binary.